adira

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“No one says the word beautiful.
It doesn’t feel right to give something so marvelous, so dizzyingly wild, a compliment. That’d be claiming that we have the right to look at this water and decide whether it’s beautiful. And looking at the pool is the opposite of that: It’s feeling very small, both incidental and fortuitous, like maybe the star-mattered water would look at us and say, I think they’re pretty, and the moon and the cave and the falls would nod: You always did have good taste. How could you not? You’re the center of the universe.”
― Emily Henry, A Million Junes

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo